


hope is a form of energy

by KissedByNightshade



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Gen, Minor references to non-canon characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:21:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25155406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KissedByNightshade/pseuds/KissedByNightshade
Summary: In the aftermath of violence, there is change. In the aftermath of triumph, there is reconciliation.
Relationships: Chirrut Îmwe/Baze Malbus
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	hope is a form of energy

**Author's Note:**

> My players in my Star Wars tabletop campaign helped destroy the Death Star, averting the events of Rogue One and overwriting the events of A New Hope. This is my exploration of how that changes things on the galactic scale. (Contains only minor references to non-canon characters.)

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

The rebel fleet vanishes as quickly as it arrived. So quickly, in fact, that the figure obscured by the black cloak might be inclined to disbelieve it had ever been there, were it not for the evidence before his very eyes.

He orders the the bridge emptied, and he watches as the officers and engineers hurry past him, averting their eyes. Foolish, really. He is known for his wrath, certainly, but it is a slow thing. A focused thing. He does not unleash it upon those who have not yet failed him. It is, of course, only a matter of time before they prove to be as useless as their predecessors.

Darth Vader sees the cataclysm before him through the red tint of his suit. If he were to reach out with the Force, he might explore the wreckage as a mortician performing an autopsy. There, a strut half the width of a Star Destroyer. Beyond, the twisted paneling drifting aimlessly. The largest surviving piece of DS-1 is the circular framework of the dish, a hole in the sky where the station’s superweapon once was.

Hundreds of billions of credits, hundreds of planets’ raw materials, millions of laborers, thousands of hours of scientific and engineering talent. All their efforts, gone. Flushed into vacuum of space.

_The Emperor will not be pleased._

The low white lights gleam against his helmet as he tilts his head toward the moon. Jedha City is far, far below, smoldering but still present beneath its rubble. The civilians, even now, will be returning to their homes. Shaken, but alive. All thanks to their new friends in the Rebellion.

In hindsight, it is embarrassingly easy to figure it all out. The rebels’ gambit aboard the Executrix. Their baited lure of the Death Star. How cunning, that they would be willing to risk the lives of all of Jedha City just to take a long-shot at destroying the superweapon. He would expect no less of Saw Gerrera and his band.

And yet. And yet, reviewing the security footage, Vader cannot shake the feeling that this is larger than the partisans and their vindictive style. For all their cleverness, all their expertise, they had been brazen and yet compassionate. Prudent and yet clumsy. The fact that he can review the security footage at all is evidence of that. He knows their faces now.

But that is not to forget the ragtag team of infiltrators recorded on the engineering levels. The transmission to Scarif, the stolen credentials, the voice modulator that mimicked Tarkin’s voice with near-perfect accuracy. In many ways, that group was almost of higher interest than the bold-faced team from the bridge.

This was not an ill-conceived plan. A three-pronged attack with minimal casualties, netting the rebels secure plans and allowing them to capture the third-most important man in the entire Galactic Empire? Not ill-conceived at all.

But he must call into question accountability. Grand Moff Tarkin had anticipated a trap, but not the ruse. And, of course, he’d gotten himself captured. With every passing moment of his captivity, the likelihood that he will be allowed to live beyond his retrieval (assuming he makes it that far to begin with) grows ever slimmer. A pity, really. His tactical abilities and merciless approach had been crucial to wresting the Outer Rim territories into Imperial control. Even more, he had allied himself with Vader. Made himself as indispensable as any non-Force user possibly could.

But he and his master are Sith. The mundane fail. Engineering and science fail. Even Inquisitors, for all their training and fearsome abilities, fail. But it is upon his shoulders to stand strong as the pillar of control that would keep the Empire from crumbling.

Therefore, where once there was hope, there now lies wrath. Anger at the rebels who dare to challenge him, and anger at all the ones who failed to stop them.

As Darth Vader kneels before the space where his Emperor’s visage soon will be, he rolls the faces of his prey around in his mind. The mysterious pilot responsible for the carnage. The renegade apprentice with his twin-headed lightsaber. The slicer, the diplomat, the saboteur. The reprogrammed droids. The gunslinger, and the disguised humans amidst Imperial and rebel corpses. He will be seeing all of them soon.

* * *

“Tell me, Baze. The whole city?”

Silence, apart from the distant howling of winds piercing irregular holes in walls.

“The whole city,” he finally grates. “All of it.”

It is an exaggeration, but it may as well be the truth. Chirrut can smell it in the wind. Jedha City smells of ash and soil. Evidence of the blasts which had been meant to execute the city, its proud bearing still defiant against the Empire. Even without his vision, Chirrut had glimpsed an inkling of their brightness. Even now, the city burns.

The noxious air is one of the many inconveniences of their return. He must rely on his staff to avoid tripping over debris in the middle of the road. The temple, of course, a shattered mess before them, rendering them even more homeless than before.

And they must also look to the future, beyond where they shall lay their heads for the night. The civilians speak in hushed tones in Basic and Bocci and Tograth and Huttese and a thousand other tongues about a shortage of food. About the return of the Empire, this time out for blood.

Where others speak, Baze says nothing. He does not need to; Chirrut can feel the odd mixture of anger and resignation and the strange, foreign emotion named hope.

“The Force has protected us,” Chirrut says.

He smiles, because it is true, and because saying as much causes Baze to turn his slow fury into quick, painless indignation. Like moving one’s hand off a hot stove just before the burn sets in.

“That kid warned us, and we left the city. The Force had nothing to do with it.” Chirrut doesn’t take it personally, not anymore. For Baze, it is just like this, scapegoating the Force instead of processing his own pain. The Force does not take it personally, either.

And, the Force has allied itself with the side of good. It was strong with the boy that had come through, and with several of his friends. And even if none of them had seen it, Chirrut had felt the Evil crack like an egg within the shell of the space battle far, far above. Whatever the Rebellion had destroyed, the Empire would miss it sorely.

Perhaps that would bring down war and wrath upon them. No problem; that would be no worse than they had already suffered.

_I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me._

They walk into the cusp of the ruined temple. Chirrut can hear running feet with the racing of children, their laughter unburdened with the nearby concerns that haunts their parents.

Like a forest after a fire, or an ocean after a storm. That which razed this ground has fled, and that which belongs here is already beginning to return.

“What now, Chirrut?” Baze doesn’t bother to confirm that wherever they go, they go together. “Are we leaving?”

“We’re staying,” he insists. He raps his walking stick against the ground for emphasis, and Baze grunts. “We are going to help these people.”

“Against the Empire?” The repeating blaster shifts against the stone wall it is propped against.

“Against anything that wishes them harm.”

Silence once again, then another grunt as Baze hefts their supplies onto his shoulder. “Let’s find somewhere to sleep, then.”

And so it shall be.

* * *

You know, it hurts, sometimes, to see the ways this war has broken him apart.

Cassian Andor isn’t normally one to let little things like his lack of close personal relationships bother him. Why would he? The things that matter to him have always been fleeting; that’s just the nature of things. He can’t afford to anticipate any more with his life than the simple solitude of the struggle. If that means that life continues around him, without him, so be it.

Even so. The yearning has set in. Yearning, a feeling that he regrets understanding the barest notion of; otherwise he could simply write off the ache in his chest as a trick of the light, or a badly-healed blaster shot, or asthma. But as he watched that ragtag band head off into the sunset for their victory vacation, he maybe wished a little bit that he could possibly, incidentally come along.

Not that he would ever say as much. So he won’t.

No one can know about this. Not even K-2SO, who would never let him live it down. So, he didn’t tell anyone where he was going. Just liberated some liquor and some simple syrup and a couple of pillows and climbed up the roof like some kind of mountain goat. It’s easy, with his experience. Years of jumping barbed-wire fences and rooftop gaps makes this child’s play. And the accommodations he’s brought along make this a genuinely comfortable place to take off his jacket, put on a pair of visors, and lounge with a martini.

Yeah, this is it. Leaning back, sipping a liquid the color of hyperdrive injector fluid, taking in the sights and smells of the upper canopy of Yavin IV. Mid-afternoon, still during the dry season, none of the bustle of the big city spaceports where he usually takes his rare moments of leisure. He has missed it — the chance to slow down. If he ever really had it in the first place.

Does Vesik ever come up here? Does Keye? No; that’s not something he needs to worry about. The sun is bright and hot; it makes sweat bead on his forehead. The air tastes like humidity, nothing like the cold smog from Fest that he’d grown up on. It makes his new coat cling to him, though he doesn’t remove it. It’s just the price he pays for staying ready for anything, at any time.

A ship passes overhead, then another. Y-wings, returning from a mission or a training exercise. He imagines the chatter that passes between them over comms, the affectionate breaking of fast as they file into the cantina. Annoying, he’d thought; not anymore. He’s identified the feeling as rooted in something else, now.

Maybe that’s all he’s really needed. A team. A home. True partners in his work, not just individuals he can use like instruments in surgery until the job is done.

He needs a new reason to rebel.

Cassian lingers for a few hours, before picking up his empty martini shaker and pillow and climbing back down. There’s work to be done.

* * *

Hera has had easier days than this one. Today, the universe is conspiring against her.

The counsel meeting isn’t going as planned, for starters. Her credentials lend her little credence against the High Command members, experienced senators and generals all, and they aren’t convinced by her statistics. In fact, she has the distinct suspicion that they’re going to listen to Draven on this one, taking a track that will potentially alienate several systems.

This is not made easier by the fact that she feels vaguely nauseous, her stomach leaping into her throat every time she tries to counter the things he is saying.

And Jacen is crying.

He picks inconvenient times to wail like this, leaving her to make a tough decision every time — try to ignore the screaming and the dirty looks, or step out of whatever briefing or meeting she’s attending to attend to his needs. Today, she hastily apologizes to the others gathered around the table and hurries away, bundling the infant into her arms like the tiny, fragile creature that he is.

He is so very small. Within his sling, he almost vanishes.

“There, there,” she tries, feeling the words foreign on her tongue. They are not the words of her family, not her mother’s words — but she can’t remember her mother’s words. She tries again. “Are you hungry?

Jacen continues wailing. He does not tell Hera what he wants, only that he wants.

The things that Jacen wants are so simple, so vital that he truly can’t live without them. He wants milk from her breast. He wants to sleep, or to not sleep anymore. He wants a fresh diaper. Mostly, though, he wants his mother to hold him in her arms as he receives these things.

She nurses him. She changes his diaper. Then she sits in the Ghost, holding him in her lap and flicking her lekku back and forth over his head, just out of reach, as he tries to grab them.

“If Kanan were here, what would he think?” she muses aloud. No one is here to answer back.

If Kanan were here, he’d be the perfect father, just like he had been to Ezra. To Sabine. She bets he’d prioritize fatherhood over Rebellion, even; he never had been suited for revolution. Not like her.

But Kanan isn’t here. So she is all Jacen has.

How does motherhood suit her? She is afraid to ask. The High Command probably would worry over how it is taking away from her ability to be the ace pilot that had taken back Lothal. Meanwhile, her little gaggle of friends that she’s accumulated would probably tell her she should give herself some grace, give herself the chance to really mother Jacen.

She’s not even 30 yet. If it had been up to her, she never would’ve brought another fatherless twi’lek into this galaxy.

But that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? She was selfish. She wanted to hold onto something to remind her of Kanan, something more than the chunk of kalikori that commemorates him.

Well. It doesn’t matter now. They’re here, and there’s no going back.

Jacen Syndulla sleeps soundly in his mother’s arms. And when he wakes, her face smiles back at him.

* * *

The smell of a well-used cargo ship’s cockpit is nothing new to Bodhi. He might find himself more thrown by a new-ship smell -- if he knew what that smells like. Of course, plenty of other pilots have been through here before, held these handrails, sat and slept in these seats.

“Do you like her?” says the rebel general.

“She’s- she’s beautiful,” he stammers.

And she is. Not quite as high-tech as the Imperial cargo shuttles that he’s flown the past handful of years, but remarkable. Unique in a way that the shuttles never were. Allowed to exist in its own right, not as part of series, no more special than any one of its pilots.

‘Interchangeable’ is the word you’re looking for, he reminds himself. In the Empire, that meant he was a cog in a wheel.

Here, he is still interchangeable, but that is not a bad thing. That means if something happens, if something goes horribly wrong, someone else can step up to take his place.

Bodhi sits. The pilot’s seat is raised higher than he needs it, so he takes the time to lower it so his feet rest on the metal grating. There, the cracked leather of the armrests and the throttle. Above, the dim green lights of the upper console. Through the viewport, the cavernous temple chamber that has been transformed into the rebels’ main hangar bay.

He sighs and leans back. It isn’t until the general clears his throat that he remembers that he isn’t alone and sits up straight again.

“So, um,” he says. “You said my assignment is what, exactly?”

“You’ll be a blockade runner,” he is told. “We need supplies now more than ever.”

He imagines it. Him, at the head of a ship not fast or strong enough to blast through a line of star destroyers. He’ll have to get good at lying. He’ll have to get good at bluffing and sneaking around.

“Are- are you sure that’s a good choice?” Bodhi stammers, panic welling and visible in his eyes. “I’m not really equipped for… that sort of thing…”

“Relax, kid,” says the general, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll have someone along to keep you safe.”

“And who’d that be?” he asks, because he feels bold and nervous all at the same time.

“Someone you don’t hate too much, hopefully,” comes Cassian Andor’s grating voice as he steps into the cockpit as well. “Good to see you again.”

* * *

Leia is a good daughter. She isn’t particularly obedient, or even always the nicest to her parents. But, for big things like this, she’ll make any sacrifice they ask of her.

Even if it means going to this dump of a backwater planet.

If you asked her about her least favorite aspect of Tatooine, she would have to think about it; she has a lot of options. There is, most prevalently, the sand — miles upon miles upon fucking miles of sand in every direction. It’s everywhere. It somehow creeps into even the rough-hewn tunic that farmers out here wear, and that she has bought to match her new host family. If the fabric hadn’t started out with a bland, cotton-colored blend, it certainly would be dyed that color by the end of her first week apprenticing on the moisture farm.

The back-breaking labor of the moisture farm is, of course, difficult, though she does not object. Working alongside the Skywalker boy and the family droids is anonymous enough to take her mind off of everything going on in the sky far above. Even the radiation-blocking gear, which is thick and leaves her sweating constantly, is feather-light after a while.

What isn’t light is each cannister of water as they load it into Luke’s speeder, then the trailer behind the speeder, and cart it to town. Each filled with gallons and gallons of groundwater, pulled up from deep under the sands.

Moreover, the weight doesn’t decrease as they unload them at Tosche Station. Hardly even a town, though Luke always seems impressed when there are more than about 20 people in the cantina-slash-flophouse located there.

“Either we sell them here or cart them all the way to Mos Eisley, and it’s not worth the fuel,” Luke explained the first time they stopped before taking the road all the way to the only real city within two rotations. She shrugged and did her part to help unload.

What grinds her gears is the pilthy amount of credits Luke got for his hard work. The handful of cash, some Imperial credits and a few Hutt peggats, was all he had to show for each trailer full of water. Precious life itself, and unhinged capitalism means that the only people who can afford to pay a decent price for it are the ruling class themselves — the Hutt rulers of the planet, and their minions.

Of course, there’s nothing that Leia can do about that. Not yet, at least. She’s here for one reason and one reason only — to learn the ways of the Jedi so that she can take down the Empire.

Riding shotgun to Luke as they run their errands is boring at best, but it is all worth it to know that on their days of rest, the ones when they aren’t toiling in the sun, they have a different destination. A secret place, one where they can train and meditate and study, and prepare.

Some day, some day soon, they will be Jedi. And then she will crush all of her enemies beneath her heel.

* * *

Hope is a form of energy.

The galaxy is brighter now, brighter than Ahsoka Tano has seen it in many years. Probably since the day that she brought a captured Maul onto a Republic cruiser with the anticipation of a war finally ended. At nearly 40 years old, she wonders what a more hopeful life would have done to her.

As it is, she had lost hope for a long time. She found pieces of it, shattered across the galaxy like stars, and then lost them too.

It has taken a long time to come to the conclusion that she didn’t deserve what happened to her.

None of them did. She didn’t deserve to be essentially orphaned at the tender age of 17 and left to the mercies of a cruel galaxy. Padme Amidala didn’t deserve to die and orphan her own children. Obi Wan didn’t deserve… whatever happened to him (he had been increasingly vague about the specifics), and he doesn’t deserve her continued anger. He had to isolate himself, she understands now. Protecting the children was the most important thing.

Understanding that is one thing. It’s another thing, to feel the pangs of some emotion in her chest as she watches them train, spar against each other, argue and laugh together, twins and strangers wrapped up in one.

It is regret, she realizes. Regret that she had never known them before she came to Tatooine.

Ahsoka Tano has many things to regret, even if she also knows that she has little control over what has happened. She is just one person.

“I was a child,” she whispers into the empty cockpit. Into the field of stars streaking by in hyperspace.

She was a child, and children cannot stop evil Sith lords from plotting to take over the galaxy. Children cannot stop massacres and injustices. The adults are responsible for keeping the children safe, and if they fail to do so, any guilt the children feel is an illusion.

None of that allows Ahsoka to forgive herself. Not for losing Anakin.

She was a child then, but she is an adult now. The galaxy’s children are her responsibility. She swaps to the navi-computer and begins inputting a new destination.

Yes, her responsibility — her destiny — is still to come. She may not have been able to stop the Emperor from rising to power, but she can help those who will be his downfall. Old becomes new. Despair becomes hope. From the field of graves will blossom flowers anew, and the sun will shine again.


End file.
